Our pilot study currently combines two curricula that have demonstrated
success in teaching preschoolers how to read. We felt there was also a vacuum in
kindergarten and wanted to apply the combo curriculum in both the kindergarten
setting. For the second year, we are recommending that a third curriculum be
added to further enhance reading vocabulary and cognitive development.

About 1/2 hour of class instructional time is required per day, emphasizing
Frontline Phonics. This curriculum includes a powerful music-based component
that helps students to learn letter names and sounds very quickly, as well as
many fundamental phonic rules. Children can typically begin reading within just
a few weeks. In addition, we recommend:

Volunteers, older students, or aides be used to provide 20 minutes per
week of one-on-one reading time with each child.

Students be provided access to the Reading Master or the Doman Picture
Dictionary computerized curricula 15-30 minutes per day. this is to enhance
vocabulary and cognitive growth. We believe it will lead to enhanced reading
comprehension long-term.

Books, videos and computerized curricula be checked out to students as
"homework," and that parents be encouraged to spend ˝ hour a day in a
reading-related activity with their child.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT

Teachers during Year 1 agreed that Frontline Phonics is the best curriculum
they know of in teaching the letters and sounds. A rating of 4.6 on a 5-point
scale (with 3 meaning AS GOOD AS anything they had ever used before) in
"teaching letter sounds" means most teachers feel this curriculum is head and
shoulders above anything they have ever seen. While Frontline Phonics teaches
superb decoding skills, Reading Master and the Doman Picture Dictionaries can
help students build their word recognition vocabulary and general knowledge
base.

None of the schools participating in Year 1 of the Early Reading Pilot
Project used the combined curriculum exactly as recommended. Those implementing
the pilot curriculum most closely to how it was recommended seem to have the
greatest success – and, thus, rate the curriculum more highly overall in the
Teacher Survey. For Year 2 several of the schools are making an effort to adjust
their implementation more in line with original recommendations.

Frontline Phonics President John Lant points out that some teachers are not
achieving as much success because they are not following the program as
designed. Those teachers, for example, who say they have used the curriculum to
teach all the letters and sounds before their students complete at least the
first set of books are clearly not following the lesson plans because they are
intended to go together.

Teachers who are teaching letters and sounds separate from the individual
reading books are missing the primary power of the curriculum, he says. "One of
the things that drives the program is that children start blending words and
reading books after learning just a few letters. This really motivates them.
They need to be reading words and they need to be reading books after just a
handful of letters to reinforce these skills. If they do not follow the lessons
as outlined, they won’t have the same results." However, even those teachers who
did not use the curriculum as designed still said it was the best they have ever
used.

Kindergarten teacher Kim Remsberg of the Entiat (Wash.) Elementary School
says her students were "leaps and bounds above where they were last year. I
couldn’t be more pleased." She says some of her students knew no letters or
sounds when they arrived at class, but with this program knew all letters and
sounds by the end of the first quarter. By mid-January, she said most of her
students were "emergent readers" able to "sound out many words" and do "a lot of
blending. ... They don’t have the problem they’ve had in the past with blends.
It’s really been amazing."

Kindergarten teacher Teresa Wilkins from the Initiative Learning Center in
Nampa, Idaho, says. "The kids really get into it. At first I thought, ‘The boys
aren’t going to get into this.’ But they really do enjoy it. ... I never had so
many kindergartners reading so soon, so that’s exciting." Preschool teacher
Diana Bradshaw, also from the Initiative Learning Center, only has her students
5 hours a week, but saw most of them learn all the letters and sounds -- and
read the first set of 13 books.

Trish Fairbairn, kindergarten teacher at Selkirk (Wash.) Elementary School,
says, "The children are further along than they have ever been." In January she
noted, "There is only one kid in the whole class who is not reading. But usually
by this time the kids are just barely starting …. What I like best is that
it gets them through so quickly. When I first saw that they had two letters a
week, I didn’t think they could do it," but early success with prebooks gets the
children excited that they can read, and away they go.

Kari Arlint, kindergarten teacher at Rose Valley Elementary School in Kelso,
Wash., was hindered by illness much of the first year, finally having to miss a
couple months of class for surgery. In December, before she took her leave of
absence, she already felt that "even the slow kids are 5-6 months ahead of where
they would have been."

The music is one of the most important elements of the Frontline Phonics
curriculum, she says. "The more they listen to the music, the more they like it.
I was afraid they would get tired of it." She added that the curriculum and the
early reading success encourage parental involvement. "Most parents are now
involved – even those who obviously haven’t been as involved with their children
as they should have been in the past."

Ms. Arlint has developed puppets to go along with the curriculum so children
can each, in turn, stand up with their puppet letter as the class reviews the
alphabet or sings the curriculum’s Alphabet Song. She also glued magnetic strips
on the back of the letter figurines the children "earn" as they pass off each
letter so the children can stick them on their refrigerators at home.

Boistfort (Wash.) Elementary School used the supplemental Reading Master
curriculum much more than the other schools. Educators there were very excited
about the Reading Master computerized curriculum, although they were struggling
to find a good way to provide ongoing assessment of the children’s reading
progress achieved with that program. The Reading Master system expects children
to absorb reading vocabulary over a period of time using the curriculum – not
necessarily letter by letter or word by word in an organized fashion. It offers
no regular teacher’s manual with lesson plans to use in teacher-led instruction.
Consequently, some teachers have been uncomfortable with its approach.

Boistfort educators, however, sent 5-6 preschoolers and kindergartners at a
time to the library, where Nancy Reber oversees their use of Reading Master’s
computerized curriculum. The expansion of vocabulary and the intellectual
excitement caused by the program has the educators at Boistfort very pleased.
They see the curriculum as much more than a reading program. The curriculum
includes lessons on such topics as clouds, zoo animals, birds, astronomy, horses
and cats – and in all of these subjects, it refuses to speak down to the
children. The books include much information that most adults do not know.

"They are definitely learning a lot," says Mrs. Reber. Older students are "in
awe" of what the younger students are learning through the program. For example,
some overheard the younger children talking about different breeds of horses and
how horses are measured in "hands." The younger children were trying to figure
out how tall a Shetland pony is, using the hands method.

Mrs. Vandemeer, the special education teacher, has also found the curriculum
to be very well received by her students. She has finally found a curriculum
that seems to reach a fifth-grade autistic child who was not responding well to
anything else. She feels Reading Master will be very valuable in helping her
students with "holes" in their education. To help with assessment, she has
developed a list of vocabulary words used in each book. She also has correlated
the books a little better so non-fiction books and related fiction books in the
curriculum support each other better in the development of reading vocabulary.

Several teachers in the Pilot Project have said the Frontline Phonics program
needs more practice and review, so they have used other material from their
files to supplement. However, Frontline Phonics has now added another set of
books to correlate exactly with the initial Blue Readers. The new Orange Readers
will help provide the additional practice Ms. Gjelten felt was missing. Some,
however, still feel it needs more worksheets -- which is typically easier for
teachers to find from other sources.

Debbie Clayton has a full-day ESL kindergarten class at Westgate Elementary
School in Kennewick, Wash. Despite their English deficiencies, she said more
than half of her students were already through the prebooks and halfway through
the first set of 10 readers by mid-December. The book at that time already had
61 words in it. "This program helped my ESL students a great deal. Most of them
learned the letters and sounds much quicker than in previous years. They also
began to blend letters into words much sooner." she says.

Most of the children – including those who came to school without knowing
more than a couple of letters – knew all the letters and sounds by Nov. 5 –
"much quicker than ever before," she says. One of the students who made the most
progress came to class without knowing any English whatsoever. He seemed to have
no problem learning to understand the language at the same pace that he learned
to read his new language.

Mrs. Clayton spends 20-25 minutes each afternoon in group instruction of
Frontline Phonics, particularly emphasizing the musical portions of the
curriculum. "The kids love the ABC songs," she says. She then has four para-educators
come in for 1 hour a day to work with the children ˝ hour on reading and ˝ hour
on math. In the morning she uses the Open Court curriculum with the children,
which is a curriculum she has used for several years.

Bonnie Moorhouse of Westgate Elementary is also using both Frontline Phonics
and Open Court, and she feels the two work well together. "Open Court can be
kind of boring by itself," she says. "I like how fast Frontline Phonics goes
along, and I love the music." She also likes the motivation provided when
children earn little figurines for learning the name and sound of a letter. Mrs.
Moorhouse says the biggest problem in using Frontline Phonics and Open Court is
confusion when she is not teaching the same letter with each curriculum.

Debbie Dammel of Wilson Creek Elementary School said the children love the
music and benefit so much from it that she copied the music to send home with
her students. Debbie also used the Reading Master videos, running them as
children arrive to the classroom. During the last quarter the school decided to
see how well their preschool children could do with Frontline Phonics. The
younger children were able to make so much progress that the school decided next
year to begin using the curriculum the first quarter of preschool rather than
wait. They plan to finish some of the curriculum in kindergarten as they then
begin a new curriculum. "We feel this will give the incoming kindergarten
students a very strong start (before) their kindergarten year and expect all to
be reading by the end of the year," Ms Dammel said.